


Flashpoint

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Pencils In the Margins, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-15 00:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21244724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: History on the planet Enuan has gone wrong, and it's up to Bill and the Doctor to put it right.  But they're not the only time travelers here.Note: Ace is asexual in this particular story.





	Flashpoint

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anonymous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymous/gifts).

The bar was loud, and the energy of the room struck Bill as a little desperate. Which made a lot of sense. Half the people here knew that they were an illegal sort of person, and the other half knew they could get in trouble for associating with them. Bill was one of only two people in the place who knew there wouldn't be a police raid tonight.

She looked around, trying to be discreet. People were dancing frenetically. They were all humanoid, despite not being human, which was something that Bill hadn’t got the Doctor to explain very well. There were two species here, but Bill couldn’t tell them apart and neither, apparently, could most of the locals. Not without taking clothes off, anyway.

That was what usually happened, when the police raided this place. People would be stripped down and checked to see if they were part of the egg-laying species, the monotremes. If they were, they were arrested for being out after curfew, and other, equally rage-inducing charges. It wasn’t the racism that Bill was familiar with. But it was racism—naked, unadorned, without the pretense of fairness that most racists tried for these days. She felt like she had gone back in time, not forward.

There was a woman at the bar who looked out of place.

She wasn’t obviously odd. White woman (whatever that meant, on a planet where the categories were all different), brown hair, pleasant face. Perhaps a few years younger than Bill. Observing the crowd much like Bill was, but that could have been just looking for a dance partner. But she had a huge number of patches sewn on her jacket, and nobody else was wearing clothes quite like that. In fact—

No. Wait.

One of those patches had the space shuttle on it.

Why would the space shuttle be a thing, half a galaxy away from Earth?

Time traveler. Time traveler from  _ Earth, _ which was weird, but not the main point.

Bill slid off the bar stool, grabbed her drink—even here on another planet, it was probably wise to watch your drink—and made for the woman.

The woman looked up as she approached. A friendly look, perhaps concealing a little bit of annoyance. Bill wasn’t who she was looking for. Bill knew that. But Bill wasn’t supposed to know that, so— “I’m all out of really bad pick-up lines, so do you just want to dance?”

“Not right now, thanks,” the woman said. “Been here long?”

“Just got in. It’s—” Bill waved her hand vaguely. She couldn’t say,  _ it’s depressing, watching people make the same mistakes on different worlds, _ so she said, “It’s definitely a pretty popular place. I’m Bill, by the way.”

And, according to the planet’s history, the place where the uprising started.  _ If _ they managed to keep history intact.

“I’m Ace. Look, just a—small tip. In two nights, there could be a little trouble. You might want to—” Ace spotted someone near the door. “Excuse me. Gotta go.”

She cut through the crowd. Bill followed, dodging dancers. “Listen—”

“This  _ really _ doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“I think it does, actually,” Bill said. The woman they were following was butch-looking and seemed part Asian to Bill’s eye, except that they didn’t have Asia here and might not have butch. Gel-spiked hair. Flat-chested, which meant she was probably a monotreme, but even the locals couldn’t be sure. “Listen, whatever you’re going to try to do, you’d better not. I know you’re probably trying to help, but it’ll make things worse.”

They were out the doors, now. Ace gave Bill a long look. “What do you mean?” she said slowly.

Bill took a deep breath. “Okay, I know you’re a time traveler, yeah? So am I. And I figure you’re trying to protect  _ her— _ Arvonis—but if you do, the uprising happens at a time when the police are prepared for it and things get a lot worse for the monotremes, so you really, really need to back off. I’m sorry. I don’t want to see her get hurt either.”

_ “I’m _ not the one making the changes,” Ace snapped. “I’m here to prevent the changes. Come on!”

The two of them dashed after the woman.

When they caught up, Arvonis was facing a man. White, ordinary, hairline that was going to make up its mind and seriously start to recede one of these days.

"Two of you?" the man said.

Beside Bill, Ace tensed.

“It didn’t say two of you. It said—it doesn’t matter. I can deal with two.”

Bill moved in front of Arvonis, who put a hand on her shoulder. “Let me deal with this.” She sounded strong, confident, which fit with what Bill knew about Arvonis.

“Don’t think you can,” Bill said. “Listen, if this all goes wrong, there’s a man. Velvet coat, grey flyaway hair, tall and thin. Calls himself the Doctor. Find him, and—”

“Calls himself  _ what?” _ Ace interrupted.

That was when the man pulled something out of his pocket.

Ace jumped him without hesitation. The man went over backwards, and Ace grabbed for the device, and—

White.

§  
  


When the two women disappeared into thin air, Arvonis did the reasonable thing, and kicked the man in the ribs.

She usually didn’t keep beating people once they were down. She was a protector, not a bully. But he was clearly dangerous, so she kept on him, forcing him to curl up, kicking the device away from him.

Then she lunged for the device, grabbed it, and fled.

Velvet coat, grey flyaway hair, tall and thin. That’s who she was looking for.

The girls. Plainly trying to protect people. And now just  _ gone. _ Was the man she had beaten up an alien? His blood seemed to be the normal orange. But whatever he was, he had disintegrated the two young women with technology that didn’t exist outside of science fiction dramas.

Arvonis felt a bit sick.

Velvet coat, grey flyaway hair, tall and thin. That was him. Standing in an alleyway in a pool of light, arguing with a man who was short, wearing a hat, and had question marks all over his sweater. Arvonis guessed them both to be mammals—something about the  _ I belong here _ air—which got her back up, but it couldn’t be helped. As Arvonis watched, Short-with-Question-Marks poked Velvet-Coat with the handle of an umbrella.

"It's different," Velvet told Question Mark.

"You would lie to her," Question Mark said ruthlessly. "You would manipulate her. Send her into danger. You know what being our student means."

"I wouldn't do anything to her that I wouldn't do to myself. I wouldn't do anything to her that I didn't have to." Velvet's glare could have melted lead. "But you, you enjoy it, don't you? The illusion of omniscience." He didn't wait for a reply. "I'm probably the only creature in the cosmos who knows how often it goes off the rails, how often it goes wrong, how often you're left  _ improvising _ just like the rest of us—"

"I think she's dead," Arvonis interrupted.

Both men turned. Arvonis held out the device, not pointing it at anything.

“Let me see that,” both men said, and then gave each other a bit of a glare, as if they were encroaching on the other’s territory. “When you say ‘she’—’” Velvet prompted.

“There was a girl with Baharonian hair, all tight-curled, and another girl with all sorts of insignias on her jacket. Both gone. I beat up the mammal who did it. He might still be there.

Question Mark took the device to examine it. “This isn’t a weapon. It’s a sequestration device.”

“A what?”

“It transports people to a sort of temporal prison,” Velvet clarified. “But we can rescue them. Come on.”

Arvonis didn’t move. “One question.”

“What’s that?”

“Who the  _ world-end _ are you?”

She blinked as they said, in unison, “I’m the Doctor.”

“Both of you.”

The two men exchanged a glance. “It’s complicated,” Velvet finally admitted.

Possibly not mammals. Possibly aliens. What if it was aliens versus aliens? How did Arvonis know which sort of aliens were the good guys? “How do you tell each other apart if you’re both called the Doctor?”

“Call him Professor,” Velvet suggested. “Come on. We should rescue Bill and Ace.”

He turned, and opened the door of—

Exactly  _ why _ Arvonis hadn’t noticed that they were standing next to a big blue booth that didn’t belong there—that was an unsettling question. Looking  _ inside _ the booth was much more unsettling than that. “What the world-end. What the  _ world-end.” _

“You don’t have to come,” Question Mark assured her. “But you may wish to. You’re a guardian, aren’t you? You look after the people of this community, because no-one else will.”

How the hell did he know that? “How the hell do you know that?” Arvonis asked.

Question Mark gave her an enigmatic smile. Velvet gave him a look. “We’re time travelers,” Velvet said. “Making it into a mystery is just going to get her  _ more _ nervous at this point. Come on if you’re coming.”

§  
  


“You travel with the Doctor,” Bill said slowly.

“I call him the Professor.” Ace was poking around the white space, and had so far found no doors.

“Does he teach at a university, in your time?”

“What? No. We travel. I can’t imagine him settling down, honestly. University?”

“St. James’s,” Bill said. “I serve chips. And attend classes, these days, because of the Doctor.”

Ace nodded. “I was waiting tables.  _ Hate _ customer service. There are so many people who deserve a pudding to the face.”

“I know,” Bill agreed fervently. “There was this one student, the other day, who wanted a free exchange for her chips because she said they were  _ cold. _ And if you spend half an hour jawing with your friends,  _ maybe _ your chips will get cold, I mean, thermodynamics doesn’t stop for the entitled . . . No, I think the Doctor would go traveling all the time if he could. He’s got a sort of—secret. Something he’s keeping safe, underneath the university.”

“You’re going to want to watch for that,” Ace said. “If something’s sealed away, it’s virtually always looking to  _ unseal  _ itself, and sooner or later it manages it, and then you’re in the soup and have to use explosives. I  _ have _ explosives, but this room is too small, we’d get caught in the blast.”

“Wait, you have explosives?”

“Brew them myself,” Ace said proudly.

“That’s  _ really _ cool.” The more Bill saw of her, the more Ace was really cool. If they’d met under more normal circumstances, and if Ace had been a couple of years older, Bill would have asked her out. Had Ace seemed distant at the bar because she was waiting to protect Arvonis, or because she wasn’t interested in women? Or just because she knew there was little to no chance of them meeting again?

“You want them sometimes,” Ace said. “I mean, we see so many places that are at war, or in the middle of a revolution, or being attacked by aliens, sometimes it’s good to have something that goes straight through the problem. Even the Professor agrees, sometimes. He’d rather outthink it, but sometimes we’ve got to explode it.”

Bill was quiet for a moment. “You ever wonder how much you can take?” she asked. “Sorry, was that too personal a question? That was too personal a question. It’s just, I never thought I’d meet anyone who traveled with the Doctor . . .”

“No, it’s all right. We’re stuck here, and we’re both the Doctor’s companions, that already means we have a lot in common. The truth is—yeah. Yeah, I wonder sometimes. But don’t tell him, okay? I don’t want him to think of me as a scared kid.”

Bill blinked. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” Ace said. “I’ve been traveling with the Doctor since I was seventeen. Why?”

_ “Seventeen?” _ And Ace was twenty now. Bill had guessed her at a few years older than that. “No, no reason, it’s just—that’s young, to start risking your life.”

Ace snorted. “I’d be getting in trouble even without the Doctor. I’ve always been a hellraiser. This way, at least I get to raise hell for people who deserve it. How about you? Pull some sort of crazy stunt and get him to notice you, or just coincidence?”

“He caught me coming to his lectures when I wasn’t an enrolled student,” Bill said. “And then the woman I was really into turned into a puddle and started following me, and I panicked. Ever since then, we’ve been going places even though he’s technically not supposed to. I think he was a little bit in withdrawal from the adrenaline, to tell you the truth.”

“Still have trouble imagining him not traveling,” Ace admitted. “A woman you were really into?”

Bill nodded. “Yeah. I’m gay. You?”

“Not sure I’m much of anything,” Ace said. “Gay or straight. Are you from the future, though?”

“Two thousand seventeen, is that the future?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the future. I’m from the eighties. It’s nice to know that people are getting a little less weird about gay people, though. Are they less weird about people not being with anybody?”

“Honestly,” Bill said, “things aren’t  _ fixed _ yet. If they’re ever going to get fixed. It’s like—I went to this space station, right, horrible place, and there was a blue guy there who had no  _ idea _ that some people are prejudiced against black people—because they were prejudiced against him, instead. And here we are on Enuan—if we’re still on Enuan—and it’s as bad as nineteen fifties America. A whole other planet, completely isolated from Earth, and it’s as bad as it ever was. Do we ever get better, or do we just go in circles?”

“I suppose all we can do,” Ace said, “is to make sure the bad bits of the circles end as soon as possible.”

Bill nodded. “So what’s going on with the guy who put us here? I mean, what’s his angle?”

Ace was quiet for a moment. “The Professor,” she said, “never tells me everything. But we noticed—probably the same changes you noticed—and came to set it right. Enuan is supposed to stumble towards equality, not become a fascist hellworld, and the Tolsen City Uprising is what starts it. I was supposed to tag that guy with this.” She waved a device. “Sends him back to his home time and it  _ should _ lock him there.”

“I think he was ready for you,” Bill said. “Or for me. He said, ‘two of you,’ and ‘it didn’t say two of you,’ which sort of implies that he expected  _ one _ of us. I wonder which one.”

“Depends on whose Doctor is earlier, I suppose,” Ace said. “I can’t find any doors, and I can’t find any places that make a sound when I tap on them. I wonder if I can make this thing leak Artron energy. Make us trackable.” She pulled some sort of pin out of her pocket.

“Send him back to his home time and lock him there,” Bill said thoughtfully.

“Mm hmm.”

“Future Enuan must have time travel,” Bill said. “I mean, the original future, the good one. So maybe other people around him have time travel. I wonder if not being able to time travel would be a huge disability, like not being able to use computers in the twenty-first century. Or whatever they have in the future.” Bill paced. “So, if he  _ does _ come from a place with time travel, is there anything to stop him from asking his friend to time travel for him? Or—wait. What if he can use the Time Mail to send himself a message, himself in the past—”

Ace went still. “We don’t know that there  _ is _ a Time Mail,” she said.

“But if there was, he could have warned himself.  _ It didn’t say two of you. _ Like he’d got a memo about it.”

“I think you might be right.” Ace poked the pin into the device and pried a panel open. “If you  _ are _ right, all we need to do is track down the trans-temporal message and change it. Spike his wheels nice and proper. But first we have to get to the Doctor, and that means— _ hah!” _

The device beeped.

And, without any hesitation, Bill heard the Sound. The mechanical phasing sound that washed into her dreams sometimes.

§

“So you’re both the Doctor,” Bill said.

“Yes, we are.”

“At different points in your timeline.”

“Yes.”

“But you aren’t even the same  _ height. _ When you said that you can regenerate and save your life, I thought, I don’t know, maybe your hair color would change. What happened to conservation of mass?”

“Artron energy makes that very complicated,” the Doctor—Bill’s Doctor—said.

“Which one of you is first?”

Bill’s Doctor pointed to Ace’s Doctor. Also known as the Professor, apparently.

“So does that mean you remember all of this and you didn’t tell me I was going to get trapped?”

“No.” Bill’s Doctor was working the TARDIS controls, not looking at her. “Meeting yourself does funny things to the memory.”

Arvonis was standing off somewhat to the side. “I am,” she confessed,  _ “completely _ lost.”

“We came to stop a time traveler from getting at you,” Ace explained. “Only he probably found a way to prepare himself, and I failed the first time out, so Bill and her Professor came too. We’ll drop you back home, then stop the time traveler from sending himself a note telling him to expect interference, and then everything will work out.”

“Sending himself messages to alter his own past,” Ace’s Professor mused. “That’s stupendously dangerous. We probably ought to put a stop to that anyway, just for the sake of the space-time continuum.”

“I sort of figured it must be forbidden,” Ace said, “or else you would have done it. Save some of the people who’ve died along the way.”

“It’s a temptation I’m familiar with,” the Professor admitted.

“Bill and I can find the time traveler,” Bill’s Doctor volunteered, “and send him back to his own time, if you two stop him from communicating with himself.”

“And me?” Arvonis asked.

“You go back to your life.”

“But I know perfectly well that if  _ time travelers _ are taking an interest, I must have done something important, and since I haven’t done anything important  _ yet— _ unless it’s maybe saving one of my people from something. Is that it? Do I rescue someone who goes on to end segregation?”

Ace and Bill exchanged a glance. “Can’t tell you,” Bill’s Doctor said shortly.

“Just a hint?”

“I suspect you’ll realize,” the Professor said, “shortly.”

§

The crowd outside the bar snarled, and Arvonis fought. Arvonis was  _ not _ going to let herself be bundled into the police van.

It wasn’t just a matter of principle, to fight with fists and teeth as they dragged her away. In the back of her head, there was also the matter of time travelers. Time travelers, who thought she would do something important.

Dying in a cell—being a martyr—would be important.

No. No. Arvonis wouldn’t allow it. History would  _ not _ play out that way. If that was the way it was supposed to go, then Arvonis would  _ fucking _ well change it for the better. She elbowed the officer on her right, filled her lungs, and bellowed,  _ “Fight! Fight, end you, fight! They can’t take all of us!” _

The crowd went berserk.  


§

"I got a letter," Bill announced to the Doctor, as she came in for her tutoring session. It was theoretically about physics tonight. Knowing the Doctor, it could turn on a dime to be about poetry.

"A letter."

"Yeah."

"An important letter?"

"Well, it's from Ace. She says that they stopped the guy from sending a letter to his past self. Which I suppose we knew, since you said everything is back to normal on Enuan. She says that there was a fascist resurgence on Enuan and they somehow got hold of the first time traveler on the planet and they had a lot of trouble stopping them."

"That much, I remember," the Doctor said.

"And she gave me her number in case I ever need help or someone to talk to. Which I think I will. Not as a date sort of thing, because she'll be too old for me anyway, but just to—talk. Does time travel ever just  _ weird you out?  _ I mean, it was yesterday for us, it was forty years ago for her, it was—not happened yet on Enuan."

The Doctor was quiet for a moment. "That's one reason," he said, "why I never used to look back."

She was treading on the edge of emotional territory. Bill didn't know even a fraction of the Doctor's past, she knew that, but she knew there were emotionally volatile areas. "And now?"

He took a long time to respond. "Now—it was good to see Ace again."


End file.
